How to turn on dark mode for any website

Why a dark mode

Bright white pages are hard on the eyes at night and in dim rooms, and many people simply prefer light text on a dark background. Plenty of sites now offer a dark theme, but plenty don't: internal tools, documentation sites, older web apps and forums often have one bright theme only. If you spend hours a day in one of them, it's worth fixing.

The built-in way

First, check the site itself. Many sites follow your system's dark setting, so turning on dark mode in Windows or macOS is enough. Others have a theme switch in their settings or their footer.

For sites that don't, Chrome has an experimental option. As of October 2026:

1. Type chrome://flags/#enable-force-dark into the address bar.
2. Set Auto Dark Mode for Web Contents to Enabled.
3. Click Relaunch.

Chrome then darkens every website by analysing its colours and inverting them where it thinks it should. To undo it, set the flag back to Default.

It's fast to try, and it has real drawbacks. It applies to every site at once, including ones that already have a good dark theme. It often handles images, charts, colour-coded labels and brand colours badly. And it's an experimental flag: Chrome's own warning says flags can change or disappear in any release.

The manual way

There isn't a manual dark mode as such, but a few things help in the meantime:

• Reading mode in Chrome's side panel shows an article's text on its own, and lets you pick a dark theme for it.
• Zoom and brightness: turning the screen brightness down and the text size up reduces glare on bright pages.
• Your operating system's colour filters can invert the whole screen, which affects everything, including photos.

These are workarounds for reading, not a dark theme for a site you work in.

Make it permanent with a tool

A dark theme built for one specific site looks much better than an automatic one, because it can treat each part of the page properly. A userscript is a small piece of JavaScript that runs on a site you choose. A dark-mode userscript adds styles that set dark backgrounds and light text on that site's own layout, keeps links readable, and leaves photos and videos alone so they don't come out as negatives. It can also add a small button to switch the dark theme off when you need the original.

ScriptPanda is a Chrome extension that builds userscripts like this from a plain description. Open its side panel on the site you want darker, paste the request at the end of this guide, and it writes the theme for that page and installs it. Because it can see how that page is built, it can darken panels, menus and tables, not just the background.

A dark theme is just styling, so once it's built it runs without AI and doesn't use your plan's requests. Building it and adjusting it do. If something is still too bright, or a colour is hard to read, tell ScriptPanda what you see and ask it to change the tool.

Follow-ups worth trying:

• Pick a specific background colour, such as a dark grey instead of black.
• Follow your system setting automatically, so the site goes dark only at night.
• Keep code blocks in a particular colour scheme.

Pair it with a cleaner page

Bright popups and sticky banners are often what makes a page feel harsh. The related guide hides those on any site.

Limits

The tool themes the site it was built on, in Chrome on your computer. Each site needs its own tool, because each is built differently. Content inside embedded frames from other sites, such as some video players or comment widgets, may stay bright. If the site changes its layout, parts of it can go back to light colours. Open ScriptPanda on the page, say what looks wrong, and ask it to fix the tool for the page as it is now.